Dear Field & Street editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She referred to the “word on the street” that orchids need “peculiar light and perpetual feeding, and require you to keep your home chilly by day and cold at night.” Her reference to temperature requirements is particularly baffling, since all the orchids on permanent display at the Chicago Botanic Garden grow in the tropical greenhouse along with the banana trees....

Grosse fatigue Wonders never cease. When Michel Blanc’s hilarious, vulgar farce Grosse fatigue won the prize for best screenplay at the Cannes film festival last year, the American press generally agreed that its chances of stateside distribution were just about nil. A nasty, abrasively funny insider’s look at contemporary French cinema, it was felt to be far too obscure in its references and far too politically incorrect, with its sexist and homophobic gags about rape, to find much favor among art-house patrons on this side of the Atlantic....

Most mornings Leo Saucedo has breakfast at his grandmother’s house in the Little Village neighborhood and then walks two blocks to the Robert Burns Elementary School at 25th and Central Park. He arrives at 8:55, just before the nine o’clock bell. Leo, a short, amiable eighth grader, sees no sense in getting to Burns any earlier. The three-story red-brick school has no playground, and the line to pass through the recently installed metal detectors is the shortest right before class starts....

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Bismarck Theater Such considerations troubled me when I caught Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s recent concert at the Bismarck. Ali Khan and his orchestra–with its drums, harmoniums, singers, and clappers–perform a style of Sufi devotional music called qawwali, which plays a very specific role within Sufi culture. Qawwali songs, usually Sufi poetry set to music, are meant to entrance listeners, putting them in a state of ecstasy that the Sufis believe creates a mystical union with Allah....

Broken Glass Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Broken Glass is the 80-year-old Miller’s latest opus, a bold effort to reclaim his role as social conscience of the American theater: this is the playwright at his most didactic. Admittedly the script is powerful and heartfelt, Miller’s most skillful writing in decades. But that’s not saying much, given that during the last 25 years or so Miller has churned out hackneyed drivel on the order of The Creation of the World and Other Business and the incoherent film script for Everybody Wins....

Lead Story The Washington Times reported in February that since 1992 Washington, D.C., mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly has used public funds to retain Julie A. Rodgers-Edwards, a $65-an-hour makeup artist, to pretty up the mayor for all public appearances and photo and TV sessions. In March the Times reported that Rodgers-Edwards didn’t have the $45 cosmetology license the city requires, having never taken the proper tests. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CHRISTOPHER TAW: SHADOW BOXES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By contrast Taw is a realist: his boxes are rooted in, and lead the viewer back to, the physical world. The earliest box in the show, Closet (1975), literally takes the form of a closet, the glass in the position of the door. The white-walled room, with a shelf and rack, is scattered with odd two-toned hangers made of color-coded telephone wire....

SAINT JOAN As George Bernard Shaw makes absolutely clear in an introduction of more than 50 pages, Saint Joan is a work brimming with ideas–about the Inquisition, penal reform, Joan of Arc’s place in history, the eternal battle between clever individuals and entrenched bureaucracies. What the play lacks is a heart. And without a heart there can be no drama. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s as if Shaw, writing only a few years after Joan of Arc’s canonization in 1920, became so obsessed with getting the facts of her case right that he forgot to form them into an interesting story....

Second City. Credit director Mick Napier, Annoyance Theatre guru, with one of the keenest main-stage revues yet. Citizen Gates preserves the innovations of the last revue, Pinata Full of Bees: running sketches, a wizard sound design, the refreshing absence of TV-generated humor, sharp transitions, and music as backdrop rather than foreground. This 81st revue is also unashamedly political, taking wicked shots at the candidates’ lies and empty posturing. The most hilarious scenes focus on the candidates’ hapless wives, ridiculed by the media for feminist omnicompetence (Tina Fey), bubbling inanity (Rachel Dratch), and frazzled neuroses (Jenna Jolovitz)....

THE FIREBUGS Eisenring and Schmitz, who are Biedermann’s guests, proclaim to his face, however, that he and his frivolous wife are paragons of charity and compassion. The gullible couple understandably become increasingly reluctant to oppose their guests, even after it becomes obvious that these strangers who intimidate as they flatter are the arsonists who’ve been terrorizing the city. Of course there is Mrs. Biedermann’s weak heart to consider, and the imposing size and strength (and virility) of ex-wrestler Schmitz, but more compelling is the Biedermanns’ desperate wish to protect their self-image as humanitarians....

The Funky Wordsmyths, those troubadours of trouble and triumph, have changed their lineup. Gone are the drummers and the pop-style rapper, and in their place is tenor saxophonist Nate Williams, whose wailings can make you weep or dance or laugh or just stop and take another look in the mirror. Still fronting the Afro-centric poetry ensemble are poets Keith M. Kelley and Quraysh Ali and bassist Oscar Brown III, who’s still in charge of the musical direction....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps Bill Wyman was correct in his August 27 prereview of the Chris Isaak show at the Chicago Theatre. Maybe Chris Isaak is “a real dumb man’s Elvis . . . waiting expectantly for the multiplatinum seller. . .” And he has definitely pursued that hit record in the most ass-backwards manner. After all, a smart musician looking for a hit in 1993 would have given up the Roy Orbison song stylings in favor of something more Eddie Vedderesque....

Like Tiny Birds Mad Shak’s most recent, evening-length work, Like Tiny Birds, shows ample signs of this philosophy. The piece seems based on an actual dream that’s revealed to us in two halves, each time in a text that’s both displayed on an easel and read to us by a performer. Ironically this method makes the story as clear as possible yet emphasizes the distance between an elusive dream and the dry, logical, everyday words needed to describe it....

Danny Glover is best known for his film work (The Color Purple, the Lethal Weapon series), but audiences who saw him in Steppenwolf’s A Lesson from Aloes know he’s a powerful stage presence as well. In this touring production, targeted (though not exclusively) to student audiences in time for African American History Month, the San Francisco-based Glover teams up with another Bay Area performer, Felix Justice, to offer dramatic readings from the work of poet Langston Hughes and preacher Martin Luther King Jr....

Boys on the Board The Sun-Times’s Cindy Richards distilled several of the study’s arguments: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pleased to read this sympathetic coverage, CWIP members were perplexed by a contrary editorial in the Sun-Times a couple of days later: Mild-mannered and not especially intelligible, the editorial reasoned, “Everybody and his or her cause needs dough. As for breaking down charity for women’s issues, wouldn’t education, health care and job programs all be considered women’s issues?...

Bob Katzman was 15 when he opened a newsstand in a three-by-four-foot wooden shack at the corner of 51st and Lake Park in 1965. He called it Bob’s Newsstand. The business was a success, and as it grew and expanded–eventually becoming a walk-in store–it began to acquire an international flavor. Katzman sold European magazines, and, during the war, newspapers from North Vietnam. Twenty years and two fires later he decided the neighborhood was no longer amicable to his enterprise....

Fugazi have been channeling posthardcore rage and doubt into something irreducibly potent for nearly a decade: they haven’t just escaped hardcore’s stylistic straitjacket; they’ve redesigned it. Though they’ve never released a bad record, their superb new album Red Medicine (Dischord), which bristles with a vigorous blend of raw energy, mathematical precision, and unfettered emotion, is more vital than anything they’ve done in quite a few years. Fugazi’s brilliance at fusing abstract sounds and rhythm, and making them work both within the song and independent of it, remains nonpareil....

Health: Bad for the Bone The link between smoking and impotence has been well-known for years among health professionals–just as anyone who’d ever seen a smoker cough hard enough to expel vital organs could make the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer long before there was a Surgeon General’s warning. In fact, the smoking-impotence link has been “talked about for 20 or 30 years,” says David Mannino of the National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta....

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG Apple Tree Theatre In his script for Merrily George Furth (Sondheim’s collaborator on Company, whose brittle humor and snappy jazz-pop musical style Merrily recalls) focuses on a trio of close friends–composer Franklin Shepard, lyricist Charley Kringas, and writer Mary Flynn. The script follows their relationship from its hopeful beginning to its sordid dissolution some 20 years later, as the success of Frank and Charley’s early collaborations leads them down different paths; Mary–a wisecracking drunk apparently patterned after Dorothy Parker–goes along for the ride....

HORST JANSSEN The drawing Hyacinth Bulb has a white background with just the hint of a table. The bulb’s deep purple is divided by precise black lines girdling it like the longitudal lines of a globe; less clearly delineated leaves sprouting from it at the right and cradling it at the left give the whole an oddly suggestive shape. In the smaller of two watercolors titled Fish Head, the paper itself, stained with whites and grays, is torn at the upper right, neatly mirroring the fish head’s detachment....